o hai! I can haz a browser and a thin client... I callz it Operating System. Iz no VNC or RDP! srsly, kthx bye.

*lol*... Funny how they call "real" applications for "legacy PC apps" haha... nice one. As someone said, these "legacy" apps most of the time are THE reason people even use a PC... and they want to get rid of them. HTML5 will save us all!

Funky stuff.

That being said... put Windows RDP client and Silverlight on that thing... and I'll buy one.

Yeh, a future where the default way to use an app is via HTML5 makes me sad because it's just so *-backwards.

I appreciated it when people found ways to create user-interfaces in HTML and JS because it was attractive for certain use-cases - no extra software to install on client; updates are made once on the server; works on a variety of platforms. Originally what
they could do was limited, and gradually browsers have been improved to make more and more possible without questioning: if the original goal was creating a technology to make application user-interfaces work cross-platform, and remotely, would you end up
where we are now with HTML5?

I think the answer is emphatically: no. You'd probably end up with something more like Silverlight. But because Silverlight isn't a 'standards based effort' and also because it's not very ambitious (MS sees it as competition for Flash rather than as a replacement
for the web), most industry effort is behind HTML5.

Yeh, a future where the default way to use an app is via HTML5 makes me sad because it's just so *-backwards.

I appreciated it when people found ways to create user-interfaces in HTML and JS because it was attractive for certain use-cases - no extra software to install on client; updates are made once on the server; works on a variety of platforms. Originally what
they could do was limited, and gradually browsers have been improved to make more and more possible without questioning: if the original goal was creating a technology to make application user-interfaces work cross-platform, and remotely, would you end up
where we are now with HTML5?

I think the answer is emphatically: no. You'd probably end up with something more like Silverlight. But because Silverlight isn't a 'standards based effort' and also because it's not very ambitious (MS sees it as competition for Flash rather than as a replacement
for the web), most industry effort is behind HTML5.

Indeed. It's so insane. It feels like going back to DOS and trying to make buttons and windows and what not from scratch... then came Windows... and the rest is history.

Maybe this is what web is trying to do... or I don't know. It's so silly trying to make full applications in HTML... maybe not silly but actually pretty insane.

Maybe the issue started where "almost regular" users felt like they are developers and made "home pages"... somehow, as soon as it's the web we talk about, all people think they know what is best since they know a little HTML.

Annoying. I'm glad Silverlight is here though.

I'm learning Silverlight not because Windows WPF apps are bad, but because I see Silverlight as what the web should have been from the start. I frankly hope that Silverlight someday becomes the replacement of Windows applications. I almost think that is
where we are headed right now... but very very very slowly to not kill off the ecosystem of Windows too quickly so everyone can adapt.

20 years from now... maybe everything will be running in something like Silverlight.

Flash tried but failed because it was kind'a "script"... but Silverlight + C# + VS can not even remooooooootely be compared to Flash. Maybe Flash was a test run... who knows.

One thing I'm sure of though... although we see all this "fight" going on between the big giant corps... in the background, most likely they are buddy buddy at some level.

Yeh, a future where the default way to use an app is via HTML5 makes me sad because it's just so *-backwards.

I appreciated it when people found ways to create user-interfaces in HTML and JS because it was attractive for certain use-cases - no extra software to install on client; updates are made once on the server; works on a variety of platforms. Originally what
they could do was limited, and gradually browsers have been improved to make more and more possible without questioning: if the original goal was creating a technology to make application user-interfaces work cross-platform, and remotely, would you end up
where we are now with HTML5?

I think the answer is emphatically: no. You'd probably end up with something more like Silverlight. But because Silverlight isn't a 'standards based effort' and also because it's not very ambitious (MS sees it as competition for Flash rather than as a replacement
for the web), most industry effort is behind HTML5.

RHM: almost agree totally... one thing though:

I think MS does see Silverlight as more than a flash competetor, I think it may have started as an "MS Version of Flash" but i bet at HQ they see a *LOT* more than just that by now.

just my impression but i think they see a lot of uses for Silverlight and will just keep cranking out new versions for a while and expanding on what it can do.

Yeh, a future where the default way to use an app is via HTML5 makes me sad because it's just so *-backwards.

I appreciated it when people found ways to create user-interfaces in HTML and JS because it was attractive for certain use-cases - no extra software to install on client; updates are made once on the server; works on a variety of platforms. Originally what
they could do was limited, and gradually browsers have been improved to make more and more possible without questioning: if the original goal was creating a technology to make application user-interfaces work cross-platform, and remotely, would you end up
where we are now with HTML5?

I think the answer is emphatically: no. You'd probably end up with something more like Silverlight. But because Silverlight isn't a 'standards based effort' and also because it's not very ambitious (MS sees it as competition for Flash rather than as a replacement
for the web), most industry effort is behind HTML5.

I wonder if the reason HTML5 and other gimmicky frameworks are becoming so popular for application frontends is because of the lack of any native, sane, modern, and first-party UI framework in Windows.

Anytime, MS wants to counter Google they can. With the improvements with remote FX and virtualization, there's no need to port applications to html 5. Eventually legacy code will die or be reinvented and resold.

I wonder if the reason HTML5 and other gimmicky frameworks are becoming so popular for application frontends is because of the lack of any native, sane, modern, and first-party UI framework in Windows.

lack of any native, sane, modern, and first-party UI framework in Windows.

Anytime, MS wants to counter Google they can. With the improvements with remote FX and virtualization, there's no need to port applications to html 5. Eventually legacy code will die or be reinvented and resold.

Terminal Services Web-Access (aka Remote Desktop Web Connection) uses an ActiveX control and only works in IE, and there isn't much point in that since if you have IE then you're going to have mstsc.exe installed too.

VNC is better in this regard because there are loads of Java applet clients for that which are inherently more cross-platform than ActiveX.

Terminal Services Web-Access (aka Remote Desktop Web Connection) uses an ActiveX control and only works in IE, and there isn't much point in that since if you have IE then you're going to have mstsc.exe installed too.

VNC is better in this regard because there are loads of Java applet clients for that which are inherently more cross-platform than ActiveX.

Except for the fact that VNC is a more fractured set of features/capabilities spread between countless different implementations and extensions.

While at first glance RDP is officially tied to ActiveX or mstsc... there are plenty of other implementations out there as well for various different OSes & devices.

You think that people who want to program using native code but don't find MFC, ATL or just plain Win32 adequate, would rather use Javascript HTML5 than WPF/Silverlight? I suppose there is a train of thought that says 'if I can't go fast then I'll go as
slow as possible instead', but it's not a very logical one.

In reality, outside of games development, nobody is queueing up to write native code.

You think that people who want to program using native code but don't find MFC, ATL or just plain Win32 adequate, would rather use Javascript HTML5 than WPF/Silverlight? I suppose there is a train of thought that says 'if I can't go fast then I'll go as
slow as possible instead', but it's not a very logical one.

In reality, outside of games development, nobody is queueing up to write native code.

That's because native Win32 code isn't a pleasure to develop in.

I disagree with your "outside of games development" because you overlook iPhone/iPad and OS X development where the Cocoa API and ObjC environment present a modern OOP platform to build on with a strong class library to boot.

Terminal Services Web-Access (aka Remote Desktop Web Connection) uses an ActiveX control and only works in IE, and there isn't much point in that since if you have IE then you're going to have mstsc.exe installed too.

VNC is better in this regard because there are loads of Java applet clients for that which are inherently more cross-platform than ActiveX.

RDP is so much more better and advanced... and faster and 1000 other things that I'm afraid VNC doesn't come close to it. I would NEVER work via a VNC client but working with RDP is a pleasure.

I disagree with your "outside of games development" because you overlook iPhone/iPad and OS X development where the Cocoa API and ObjC environment present a modern OOP platform to build on with a strong class library to boot.

I considered mentioning Apple but thought we were talking about Windows. But since you did, have you done any development for MacOS or iOS? MacOS is the last holdout of people who enjoy writing GUI desktop applications in native code. iOS apps are written
in native code mostly with high reluctance by people who grew up with Java (or in many cases Javascript) and had never written a line of C before they got attracted by dollar signs.

I think you're overstating what you get from Cocoa. The way they API gives you objects for windows/views and distributed messages isn't very different to the way ATL wraps window handles to give you objects. Of course you have the Core Animation system on
iOS which is what gives the UI most of it's zing, but it's still much closer to a traditional windowing system than WPF/Silverlight is. For example, when it comes to actually drawing in a view you are still writing procedural drawing code no different to GDI.
Many of the subsidiary frameworks are either C or behave like C and don't have much object-orientedness about them. And then there's the language that is Objective C. It's clearly a lot better than trying to write OO code in plain old C, but it combines the
slow compilation of C/C++ with the lack of compile-time type checking of Javascript.

When I went to learn iPhone development I decided that I'd go in with the right attitude and learn the 'proper' way to do everything there. Having done that my opinion is that the APIs are OK, but boy do I wish I could program it in C# instead. Which is
one of the reasons I was so disappointed the new app store rules forbid that (along with the fact that telling a programmer what languages they can use is as offensive as a government telling imigrants that they must speak English at all times).